occasionally bombarding the headquarters in an irregular manner

June 19, 2014

spooks gonna spook

Beginning in about 2005, the CIA began secretly developing a custom-made Osama bin Laden action figure, according to people familiar with the project. The faces of the figures were painted with a heat-dissolving material, designed to peel off and reveal a red-faced bin Laden who looked like a demon, with piercing green eyes and black facial markings.

The goal of the short-lived project was simple: spook children and their parents, causing them to turn away from the actual bin Laden.

Hmm, yes, very funny, maybe apart from the racist pseudo-anthropology. Anyway, this is the iron rule of the CIA: everything is true except the conspiracy theories, and we know they're not true because they're not weird enough. That aside, you can pluck any random bizarreness out of the ether - colonising Mars with trained gibbons, raising an army of zombie hopping ghosts to undermine Chinese communism - in full confidence that yes, indeed, they have tried that.

"Most of the press attention focused on the sensational detail that the government had been funding acid trips. In fact, a large part of the scandal, when it finally broke, was that the CIA and Ewen Cameron had recklessly shattered lives with their experiments for no good reason - the research appeared useless: everyone knew by then that brainwashing was a Cold War myth. The CIA, for its part, actively encouraged this narrative, much preferring to be mocked as bumbling sci-fi buffoons than for having funded a torture laboratory at a respected university - and an effective one at that."

My first thought is that mockery might have been more effective. Bin Laden gonks, say. Or talking dolls that repeated Bin Laden quotes in a high-pitched voice. Scary isn't a bad thing for kids as long as you think the scary is on your side (eg dinosaurs).

The Russians would have filled them with explosive and provided a contact-armed, vibration-triggered fuze, and then dropped hundreds of thousands of them over most of the country. Because, after all, that's actually what they did, although not with a specific Bin Laden doll.